The Glasgow, Paisley and Johnstone Canal had been built to carry goods, but the Countess of Eglinton was something new - a 59.5-foot vessel converted for holiday day trips, run from a dock belonging to a Mr Barclay in Paisley. In the seven days since the service began it had become a sensation. Word travelled the way good news travels through working towns: cheap, joyful, close to home. The cost - eight pence - was deliberately within reach of people who otherwise had no access to leisure of this kind. November mornings in Renfrewshire are usually raw and damp. This November morning was unseasonably mild. By the time the boat returned to Barclay's dock at one in the afternoon, a large crowd had already gathered, more than the boat could possibly carry. People had brought their families. They had walked, in many cases, from miles away. They had waited.

Crowd disasters share a terrible architecture. They are almost always caused not by malice but by the rear of a crowd not knowing what the front already knows. As the previous load of passengers tried to disembark from one end of the Countess of Eglinton, the waiting crowd at the other end pressed forward. The pressure built. Those at the back, anxious about losing their place, surged. Dozens of people fell into the canal. Most could not swim - working-class Scots in 1810 rarely learned to. Some drowned within sight of family members who could not reach them. On the boat itself, passengers trying to leave at one end collided with passengers boarding at the other. The narrow craft tipped, and then capsized. Over 60 people were trapped inside the long passage along its interior, in cold canal water, in the dark. Three were pulled out alive. The rest could not be reached. When the barge was finally righted a week later, the bodies were recovered and the death toll was set at 84.

The numbers do not soften with repetition. Sixty-six victims were under the age of twenty. Eighteen were under the age of ten. These were not seasoned travellers or wealthy tourists. They were children whose parents had saved eight pence apiece to give them an afternoon out - the kind of afternoon that working families in early industrial Scotland rarely had. The Times in London ran articles on the disaster on 16 and 19 November, briefly drawing the attention of distant readers to a tragedy whose weight was almost entirely borne by the towns of Paisley and Renfrewshire. The names of most of the dead were not preserved in the way that the names of the rich are preserved. They were Paisley weavers and labourers, children of the looms and mills, families whose grief was real and individual and is still owed our attention more than two centuries later. The Countess of Eglinton herself was righted, the canal eventually filled in, the storehouse demolished. The grief stayed in the families that survived.

For most of two centuries the disaster was barely remembered outside Paisley. There is no national monument. There is no canal anymore - the basin where the Countess of Eglinton lay overturned was filled in long ago, and a railway station, Paisley Canal, now stands nearby. Two small commemorative plaques honour what historians have called the worst disaster of the British Canal Age. The first, donated by J and W Goudie, was unveiled by Provost Celia Lawson in 2011 and stands on a low granite plinth in the grounds of Paisley Abbey. The second, more recent, was donated by City Gate Construction and unveiled by Provost Lorraine Cameron - it is mounted on a wall beside Paisley Canal station, close to where the boat went down. They are modest markers for what happened here. They ask passers-by to pause long enough to remember that an afternoon out, in a country only beginning to industrialise, cost dozens of children their lives.